About Vincent Clement

Vincent Clement’s Comments

For clarification purposes, in the Province of Ontario, all police officers and police services boards are bound by the Police Services Act. This has nothing to do with a city or a police board. Municipalities have minimal control over their own police forces.

It has nothing to do with his superiors or even his union (though his union has the ability ie. funding to prolong any suspension). It has everything to do with legislation that does not permit a police officer to be suspended without pay while under investigation. It's bad legislation.

By passing laws that allow the government to get around Constitutional rights under the guise of safety and security. For example, if you suffer from major depression, go to an ER and tell the nurse you have suicidal thoughts, the government can 'form' you, essentially making you a ward of the crown. Same goes for kids taken by the government.

The Beer Store - a beer retailer owned by the big three international brewers that has a government regulated near-monopoly on beer sales in the Province of Ontario - was considering filing a NAFTA complaint against the Province of Ontario if it opened up beer sales to other venues such as grocery stores.

So, three large international corporations were going to use a free trade agreement to argue that they should be compensated for potential loss of profits because their near -monopoly market share would be reduced.

Only in today's insane business and political environment could an agreement that is supposed to remove trade barriers be used to demand compensation for removing trade barriers.

The Government of Ontario is planning changes to how the quasi-monopoly known as The Beer Store operates in the province in response to a secret deal between The Beer Store and the LCBO, the government-owned retailer and wholesale or spirits, liquor and wine.

The Beer Store is owned by MolsonCoors, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Sapparo, so essentially it is a foreign-owned company that is tasked with selling beer (sadly, we can't buy beer in a corner store or grocery store).

Feeling under pressure, The Beer Store is threatening to sue the Government of Ontario using the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in NAFTA.

To summarize, a foreign-owned company with a government-granted monopoly wants to use a free trade agreement to maintain that monopoly (or at least get a bunch of money). We have jumped the shark in the free trade world.

I wouldn't count on the American public to do anything. In the past 10 years, they let strangers grope them at airports, they let CBP set up checkpoints far away from any border or port of entry, they let law enforcement seize their assets with no charge, they let spy agencies spy on them, they keep sending back the same politicians, despite a lack of trust and support in those politicians, and so on.

This is just an example of legislative and enforcement creep. You create a law in response to a supposed problem, say like reporting cash transactions of $10,000 or more. So people start depositing $9,999. Well, the government doesn't like that you figured out how to comply with the law. Only in the eye of the government can someone be breaking the law by following it.

The same applies to those jurisdictions who have a 'warn range' for blood alcohol levels. 0.08 is the legal standard in most jurisdictions that results in a criminal offence.

Well, people started to drink less, which meant less people being charged with drunk driving. So governments came up with the 0.05 to 0.08 warn range and can suspend your licence (in the Province of Ontario, the first warn range offence is a three-day suspension and a $150 penalty) if you blow in that range. No blood test has been taken and you haven't done anything criminally wrong, but you are doing something 'illegal' in the eye of the government, so pay up.